With 15 years of multiplatform experience under her belt, Rosie Allimonos has produced content for such iconic BBC brands as Doctor Who and EastEnders. We caught up with her in San Francisco to chat about audience engagement, silo breaking, and why transmedia is poised to go mainstream.

Simon Staffans: "Transmedia has never been the easiest of terms to throw around. It’s a concept trying to embrace so many different genres and so many different practices, it’s almost guaranteed to give rise to disagreements" ...

Very interesting perspective. To my opinion interactive storytelling allready goes on in the social medias. My project in that perspective is to introduce the art of storytelling in social medias. I work with filmed storytelling for digital medias. Watch my site www.digitalstotytelle.dk - it´s just about to open in enlish vesion.

The other popular strategy has been crowdsourcing the story, where the audience becomes the creator of the whole story. While some brands have done this well (Arvo Beer’s Perfect Lager Project, Magnum Pleasure Store, Fanta Flavour Lab, MyStarbucks Idea, The VW People’s Car Project in China, our own digitally customisable London Olympic Mascots), others have missed the mark (Raymond Weil’s ‘Help design a new watch’ Facebook competition springs to mind) .

But the new frontier for participation branding is putting the audience into the story, as an actual character influencing other characters and the outcome. That is, it’s not just about giving a few people a unique experience (such as the ‘Best job in the world’ campaign) any more and relying on the online amplification of that (does anyone even remember who won Best Job?), but actually creating multiple stories for the many, democratising the experience so to speak."

The best brand stories now encourage different levels of participation to achieve maximum impact and scale. This means designing interactive stories for ‘skimmers’ (those exposed to the story), ‘dippers’ (those sharing the story) and ‘divers’ (those immersing, influencing and advocating the story) is a must for marketers. This article provides information to how the social media and branding have and are affecting each other.

Webisodes, which have long been hyped as a new form of online entertainment (but rarely lived up to it), are expanding beyond Internet television and proving to be a valuable accompaniment to feature-length documentary films.

When you love something THAT much... you go out and do it. That's what Robert did. Forsaking a 'traditional' career, Rob dove into film school and then used technology to develop something that is changing the way storytelling is told. You'll have to watch this video to find out (shared courtesy of @simon_staffans). In a few weeks time, I'll be personally interviewing Rob for my 'Chasing Cyborgs' blog. Stay tuned :)

It’s become common practice for a show to casually toss a hashtag in the corner of the TV screen, but the tricky part is figuring out what comes next. The Voice and NBC have involved Twitter so heavily in the viewing experience that the end result is a fully integrated, interested, and engaged audience for advertisers and brands to reach.

It’s become common practice for a show to casually toss a hashtag in the corner of the TV screen, but the tricky part is figuring out what comes next. The Voice and NBC have involved Twitter so heavily in the viewing experience that the end result is a fully integrated, interested, and engaged audience for advertisers and brands to reach.

New forms of media are often disruptive to existing forms, but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says that his network is complementary to traditional forms like television, because it adds the kind of real-time discussion we associate with the town square...

There are some good points in this article and it’s interesting to think of second screens as an 'emerging mobile vertical'. It is worth adding though that in addition to boredom, enforced viewing i.e. a partner watching a show you’re not interested in triggers second screen use. However, neither of these use cases is likely to result in true second screen usage i.e. activities integrally related to primary screen content. The existing second screen behaviour that really created this emerging space is the need for discovery: finding content to watch; finding information related to what is being watched; and finding out what others think about it.

This presents two big challenges for second screen app developers:

1) To make the discovery route second nature. Consumer will take the path with least resistance. This requires apps to be as intuitive as possible with the least number of hurdles that may distract from viewing.

2) Currently the easiest route to content discovery is the traditional Remote Control Device (RCD); for related information it is Google, Wikipedia or IMDb searches and for social validation it's the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Modifying ingrained user behaviours may be difficult.

Fragmentation is an issue. Chuck Parker, chair of the Second Screen Society currently has over 70 second screen apps on his tablet and is tracking over 130 more. Clearly this is an increasingly crowded market. In an in-depth industry report Chuck predicts that this will continue, marked by consolidation, failure and improved user experiences.

Increasing there are calls for some levels of standardisation, which can often be seen as signs of a technology maturing.

Healthy debate exists around the merits of show specific apps versus umbrella apps owned by networks or the likes of zeebox. There are advantages for show specific apps. However, the problem is that when the show ends the audience is lost - think NBC's Olympics app. Fox have now consolidated multiple shows into the Fox Now second screen offering.

Earlier this year, Hardie Tankersley at Fox said in an Engadget interview "We're investing just enough to be in the game and to try to learn something about it." However, this does not mean Second Screen is something that is added on as an afterthought. As Tankersley says, "For a produced show like Bones or New Girl, it starts with the origin of the script. When the first script comes in we start planning with the show what the second screen content is going to be, what the merchandise that we'll sell is going to be and it gets developed in that writers room."

Hopes of a transmedia heavy future for television where viewers can choose their own ending are unlikely to be realised. All that extra content to provide different paths costs money to produce. It doesn't really sit well with the lean-back behaviours associated with TV viewing so is an experience best left to games developers who have a proven audience and means of monetisation.

"At Storygami we help individuals and brands make interactive online videos. We use a term called “layered video” for our approach. What this means is that we add elements that the audience can interact with over the top of online videos. These elements become visible only when they are triggered by the viewer or user. All these layered elements appear within the video screen itself and they are unlike pop-ups in that they are designed to enhance your viewing experience and not to distract. One of our first commissions was with Virgin Media in the UK where we produced a six part web series using our technology."

"See It will be integrated into a show’s tweet, so that with the click of a button, I can change the channel on my TV right away, record it or even watch on my mobile device," Sam Schwartz, Comcast's chief business development officer, said in a blog post.

The See It button, which will start showing up in tweets later this year, will let customers tune into shows online or from set top boxes, set their DVRs and even buy tickets through Fandango. NBCUniversal's networks like CNBC, SyFy, NBC and others will have access to the feature, for shows including The Voice, Today Show, Access Hollywood and many more.

While subscribers will have access to more options, non-subscribers will also be able to use the See It button to see shows they might be able to access through other apps from places like Hulu or ABC."

Tweet Alongside my day job for the past couple of years and various labs and seminars I have been involved in, one thing that keeps coming up is 'why is the process for making multiplatform so complicated / varied / mysterious / technical'.

this structure allows to always make improvement based on users feedbacks and behavior. basically, is to see your "product" as a service. The launch of the product is a new beginning. for lot of people, the real work starts there.

I'd also say that for too many developers "launched" is the same as "finished". Working with them to understand why a TV entertainment format has twists in weeks five and nine etc can pay dividends in more adaptable sites and frameworks.

More and more people are watching live-entertainment television shows while simultaneously interacting with the content on mobile devices. But could 'second-screen' viewing also work for documentaries?

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